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The idea of a foreign state taking control of a national newspaper seems far-fetched. A plot line in a dystopian satire of modern Britain, perhaps. And yet it might happen. [...]

Let me tell you a story. It's a story that has not been told enough, and that we need to remind ourselves of as we grow ever further from its [...]

The first edition of Erskine May, the parliamentary rule book, provides, in fine Victorian prose, an apt commentary on the current parliamentary session. 'If the same question could be proposed [...]

If you fancy reading a newspaper interview with Jeremy Corbyn, you have a better chance by picking up your local paper than any of the national titles. The Labour leader's [...]

A hopelessly divided government incapable of governing. A parliament acting, as some see it, unconstitutionally. A very left-wing opposition leader close to winning office. Businesses preparing for economic catastrophe. Hundreds [...]

Brexit has never been deliverable on the terms that were promised by Theresa May and its most ardent supporters. The question now is whether it is deliverable at all. Only [...]

The Conservatives had their big split over the Corn Laws in the 1840s. Nothing like it has happened since. In most parliaments since 1918, Labour has lost many more MPs [...]

In November 1966, Rave magazine put a colour picture of the Small Faces singer Steve Marriott on the cover. Sitting on a raised concrete flower bed, he is sporting a [...]

'I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.' Attributed by Mark Twain to 'a speculator in lands and mines' in The Gilded [...]

The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock Simon & Schuster, 368pp, 20 [pounds sterling] 'Just invade only one country at a time,' was the advice [...]

The New Statesman is rendering a great public service in making available an English-language account of the Chinese government's use of its tax laws to persecute the innovative and courageous [...]

I hated Russell Brand when I first met him. Exactly a decade ago, we were both cast in a BBC comedy drama entitled Cruise of the Gods. Steve Coogan and [...]

These are heady days for the Guardian and its editor, Alan Rusbridger. The News of the World, once the highest-circulation Sunday newspaper in the English-speaking world, is dead. Its proprietor, [...]

Steve Richards (chair) Welcome everyone. As Professor David Salisbury is running late because of a press briefing, perhaps I could ask Professor Stephenson to give some sort of context to [...]

1 THE BLACK JACOBINS CLR James(1938) The Caribbean working classes were on the move throughout the 1930s. Agitators invoked anti-colonial sentiment, which spread throughout these tiny islands. Amid this turmoil, [...]

Mirage jets swoop from the sky to destroy the Egyptian air force before breakfast; tanks race across the desert to the suez Canal; Moshe Dayan, the defence minister, poses with [...]

In August of last year my father was diagnosed with a malignant glioma and given three months to live. An artist and intellectual, he was a subscriber to the New [...]

The motto of the age, or at least since the general election, is that we must all do more to celebrate British success wherever we can find it. So hats [...]

Soon afterwards, that same paper, the North-West Evening Mail, ran the splash headline: "Fury at slur on Barrow". The upside of social mobility for local papers was the property advertising; the downside was that the incomers rarely knew their neighbours and put down the shallowest of roots - even football became less local. The following year the Birmingham Evening Mail and the Yorkshire Evening Post revelled in their monopolies: the Mail had a daily sale of 408,000; the Post 314,000. Along the way, the paper morphed into the Cumberland News, which ceased taking sides politically but became one of Britain's most admired local papers - all the while with a Burgess at the helm, until Robin Burgess stepped down as managing director in 2016. [Extracted from the article]

An RSPCA inspector was called to an address in Silverton, Devon, to reports of a tiger being kept in a cramped cage in a garden. Inspector Marije Zwager said: 'The [...]

Who wears a watch now? There's a Luddite stubbornness to their persistence when the smartphone has taken over their main function. And yet there they are--racked up in jewellers, gleaming [...]

Less than a mile from the trendy bars of central Bucharest, Florica Stuparu is gently ushering out the four small children who have gathered around her bed. This is where [...]

When I started work at the Daily Mail in 2005, there was often a discussion among the men who decided the running order of stories about which pages should be [...]

Piers Morgan was sacked as editor of the Daily Mirror because he ran the only popular newspaper in Britain to expose the 'war on terror' as a fraud and the […]

Science--not science-based, 'high' technology such as smart weapons or GM crops, but science itself--is losing its way. Since science is the most potent agent of change--the ultimately anti-conservative driver of [...]

This is the story of two men from the local press. The first, Don Hale, the former editor of the Matlock Mercury, could soon defy precedent and become the most [...]

THE BEDSIDE YEARS: THE BEST WRITING FROM THE GUARDIAN, 1951-2000 Edited by Matthew Engel; free with The Guardian Year 2001 edited by Ian Katz Atlantic Books, 268pp, £14.99 That would [...]

Text from Sarah Sands, editor of the Today prog. 'Can we have you on in the morning celebrating Geordie and his position on Brexit?' I was nose-deep in Twitter at [...]

A famously prolific writer, who had ten novels under his belt before he even began The Lampitt Papers, A N Wilson kicked off that fictional chronicle in 1933 with Incline [...]

In 1956 Granada issued a memo outlining the premise for a new series. 'Here in Britain the press has enjoyed a freedom to criticise anyone or anything it chooses,' it [...]

Are men too fragile for politics? As powerful chauvinists everywhere reverse out of public life to spend more time helping the police with their enquiries, we are being asked to [...]

Peter Wilby (First Thoughts, 31 March) seems to be suggesting that the correct response for those appalled by headlines such as the Daily Mail's 'Legsit' is not to read tabloids. [...]

According to K G Banks and Jonathan Franzen (Correspondence, 17 February), domestic cats in the United States kill a million songbirds each year. In other words, each of America's 72 [...]

Articles POSTCARDS FROM PARIS Be realistic, ask for the impossible. I'm guessing that no one really knows what they mean, and neither did the students who graffitied these poetic manifestos on the walls of Paris in May 1968. This was because a marble plaque by the hotel door told me that André Breton, co-founder of the surrealist movement and writer of its two groundbreaking manifestos for art and politics, had lived there in the 1920s. [Extracted from the article]

THE BAY OF ANGELS Anita Brookner Penguin, 2l7pp, £6.99 Anita Brookner's 20th novel is set in London and southern France, some time in the 1950s. But in fact, we are [...]

Multi-tasking should carry a health warning. This obsession with efficiency, so crucial to industrialists and entrepreneurs alike, has turned me into a tyrant. I first discovered multitasking in the features [...]

Henry Kissinger has finally met his match in Christopher Hitchens. But do they deserve each other? Frances Stonor Saunders goes into battle with two mighty egos THE TRIAL OF HENRY [...]

Queen of Our Times: The Life of Elizabeth II Robert Hardman Macmillan, 704pp, 20 [pounds sterling] The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor Tina Brown Cornerstone, 592pp, 20 [pounds [...]

In the Darkroom Susan Faludi William Collins, 432pp. 16.99 £ In 2004, after many years of estrangement, the feminist author Susan Faludi's father wrote her an email. 'I have decided [...]

Empress Dowager Cixi: the Concubine Who Launched Modern China Jung Chang Jonathan Cape, 464pp, £20 Chinese history abounds in powerful characters but few of those most prominent in popular consciousness [...]

I've spent enough time in Ikea to know that the much-vaunted Scandinavian dream isn't all it's cracked up to be. Trapped in a Nordic noir flatpack hell, you'll find it [...]

The Virgin of the Rocks is one of the jewels of the National Gallery's collection, a Leonardo masterpiece that is worth millions. It is also, I found out this week, [...]

'Steven Bigby was stabbed to death in London's Oxford Street, in a killing that shocked Londoners.' 'Teenage altar boy's throat slashed with shard of glass, say police.' 'A young woman [...]

One of the ironies of the Damian McBride scandal is that the Conservative Party communications director, Andy Coulson, one of those who stood to gain most from the affair, was [...]

When the most powerful woman on the planet speaks, it's a good idea to listen. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who recently knocked Condoleezza Rice off Forbes's top spot for […]

I have never been one of those who have said that the Bush administration, had it been more competent, could and should have prevented the 11 September 2001 atrocities. The [...]

It is a law of public administration that the more administrators there are, the more administration there is to be done. It is a further law that the more administrators [...]

Jack Molloy never thought he would go to university. He left school with two lowgrade A levels. 'I was sick of education. I was always much better at the hands-on [...]

Editor: an inside story of newspapers Max Hastings Macmillan, 398pp, £20 www.newstatesman.co.uk/bookshop Only by first being made aware of just how unsuitable Max Hastings was to occupy the editorial chair [...]